Pitt Head Coach Kevin Stallings: 'You Need 2 Or 3 Pros' To Win National Title
PITTSBURGH (93-7 The FAN) - New Pitt basketball head coach Kevin Stallings is getting the lay of the land at his new job, but took some time out of that to talk with Joe Starkey of The Starkey and Mueller Show about what it will take to get the basketball program to the point where they can be in the conversation of national title contenders.
There's obviously a number of routes you can take to reaching that level, but Stallings has an idea of the type of players you need in order to reach that ultimate goal.
"Most of the teams that win the National Championship usually have, in my opinion, three NBA guys on their team," Stallings said. "Whether that comes through who you recruit or how you develop them, because I think there's two different ways to do that, but one way or the other, you either have to recruit pros or you have to develop pros, but I think you need two or three pros on your team if you expect to be a Final Four of National Championship team."
Pitt hasn't had many of those types of players come through their program lately, whereas Stallings had two NBA-caliber players on his team last year at Vanderbilt and he shared the areas he's going to focus his recruiting efforts on in order to find more of them.
"The DMV area, DC and Maryland and Virginia, we have to be able to be effective," Stallings said. "I think another reason we need to be effective there is because that's a little more of the ACC footprint. I know for years with Pitt being in the Big East they had a lot of success in New York City. The New York City kids are going to be less apt to come because... you're not going to be in The Garden as much as Pitt was in those years. I'm not saying that you can't get kids from there. I had a kid this year at Vanderbilt from New Jersey that is going to be a first-round draft choice. It's not always about the footprint, but I think for us to sustain long-term success, that DC area, that Baltimore area, we're going to have to get kids all throughout that area."
Click the link below to hear more from Stallings as he talks about the differences in recruiting at his old school as opposed to how much easier it will be to recruit at Pitt and if he'll go after the top players in the country that the old regime tended to shy away from because of the likelihood that they'd land them.
